What is the reason for Britain to be sniffing around Iran anyway?

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.answers.com/topic/bp-p-l-c-adr

BP is also BO (Big Oil). It is the world's second largest integrated oil concern, behind Exxon Mobil. The company, which was formed in 1998 from the merger of British Petroleum and Amoco, grew by buying Atlantic Richfield Company. BP has proved reserves of 18.3 billion barrels of oil equivalent, including large holdings in Alaska. BP is the largest oil and gas producer in the US and also a top refiner, processing 2.8 million barrels of crude oil per day. BP operates about 28,500 gas stations worldwide, including 15,900 in the US. With the success of its BP Solar International subsidiary, BP has created BP Alternative Energy (hydrogen, solar, and wind power generation) with an initial investment of $1.8 billion.

<snip>The oil company, which was renamed Anglo-Iranian Oil in 1935--the year Persia became Iran--became a renewed target of nationalist discontent after World War II. The Iranians complained that their dividends were too small, and the signing of 50-50 profit-sharing agreements between governments and oil companies elsewhere--in Venezuela in 1948 and Saudi Arabia in 1950--fueled criticism of Anglo-Iranian Oil within Iran. Extensive negotiations ensued between the company and the Iranian government. Anglo-Iranian Oil eventually offered substantial concessions, but they came too late and were repudiated by the nationalist government of Muhammad Mussadegh.

On May 1, 1951, the Iranian oil industry was formally nationalized. Several years of complex negotiations followed, and eventually, a 1953 coup--in which the British government and the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) were implicated--resulted in the overthrow of Mussadegh. After his removal from power, an agreement was reached that allowed the return to Iran of Anglo-Iranian Oil--renamed the British Petroleum Company in 1954--but not on such favorable terms as the company had secured after the early 1930s dispute. Under the accord, which was reached in August 1954, British Petroleum held a 40 percent interest in a newly created consortium of Western oil companies, formed to undertake oil exploration, production, and refining in Iran.

The events of 1951-54 had encouraged BP to diversify away from its overdependence on a single source of crude oil. The Iranian nationalization deprived the company of two-thirds of its production. The company responded by increasing output in Iraq and Kuwait and by building new refineries in Europe, Australia, and Aden (now part of Yemen). Oil exploration activities were launched in the Arabian Gulf, Canada, Europe, north Africa, east Africa, and Australia. Meanwhile, BP, which had moved first into petrochemicals in the late 1940s, became the second largest chemicals company in the United Kingdom in 1967.

The company's future was secured at the end of the 1960s by major oil discoveries in Alaska and the North Sea. In 1965 BP found gas in British waters of the North Sea. In October 1970 it discovered the Forties field, the first major commercial oil find in British waters. Throughout the 1960s BP also had been looking for oil in Alaska, and in 1969 this effort was rewarded by a major discovery at Prudhoe Bay on the North Slope. In the previous year BP had acquired the U.S. East Coast refining and marketing operations from Atlantic Richfield Company, and the stage was now set for a surge of expansion in the United States. Through its large share in Prudhoe Bay, BP owned more than 50 percent of the biggest oil field in the United States, and it needed outlets for this oil.

[Donnachaidh]

1. somebody's got to pick a fight for Bush

that's reason enough. This has been in the works for months.

[peacetalksforall]

2. OIL - made to look like uranium.